Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Carlo Grante, playing the Bösendorfer 280 Vienna Concert piano, presents the culmination of this monumental series; the first complete recording of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas performed by one pianist. “One of the greatest works of our time.” (Fritz Balwit, Audiophile Audition) Carlo Grante is one of Italy’s foremost concert pianists. He has performed in such major venues as the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall, Rome’s Santa Cecilia Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Dresden Semperoper, the Stuttgart Opera, Prague’s Rudolfinum, as well as at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in the US. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras including the Dresden Staatskapelle, London’s Royal Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, Orchestra of St. Cecilia, MDR Leipzig, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Concertino Wien. The New York Met’s Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi wrote of him in 2015 that “Carlo Grante is one of the most astonishing artists I have ever known and worked with.” The principal critic of Vienna’s Die Presse dubbed him “a knight of the piano, without blemish and without fear.”

Born in Long Beach, California, on August 9, 1928, Camilla Wicks led a stellar career in the dozen years after World War Two; one of a select group whose achievements helped to establish women violinistsí prominence on the concert stage. It is worth considering that around that golden time, the likes of Heifetz, Milstein, Menuhin, Francescatti reigned supreme; the veterans Szigeti, Elman and Thibaud were still active and beloved; Stern was a firm favorite, Rabin a prodigious sensation, and Oistrakh and Kogan were just resoundingly breaking through the Iron Curtain. In this illustrious company, Wicks was considered one of the great soloists on both sides of the Atlantic, upheld by many as a queen among violinists. At the peak of her fame and subsequently, she retired more than once to devote herself to her family, but remained an outstanding if intermittent performer for many more decades. While her vinyl records have long been revered by collectors, this CD release of early live performances offers a vital opportunity for a more widespread audience to discover this astonishing artist. Wicks was recently featured in a long article in Strad magazine which mentioned this upcoming CD.

Like Volumes 1 and 2, Volume 3 of Charles Wuorinen: Music of Two Decades consists in large part of recordings that appeared first as LPs. One doesn't drape terms like invaluable as bunting. For exotic example, the Concerto for Amplified Violin and Orchestra (Volume 2) appeared first on University of Iowa Press vinyl. Not exactly your household name. (I refer to the label. Were Wuorinen's to become such, I'm sure he'd begin wondering where he went wrong. Another performance by violinist Paul Zukovsky, Inbal conducting the Orchestra of the Hessian Radio, may some day be released.) As an instance of nlh degree rarity, Easley Blackwood's own recording of his live performance of Wuorinen's Piano Variations dwelt prior to Volume l's appearance as a 7'/2-i.p.s. tape on Charles Wuorinen's library shelves. Volume 2's Grand Bamboula, Chamber Concerto, and Ringing Changes got good distribution as Nonesuch LPs which, as a format the label has long since abandoned, have been long out of print. As further reason to applaud these Music & Arts Wuorinen discs, a succession of solid performances rates soundwise from adequate to excellent. In other words, the bad news simply isn't. So, to put conclusions first, as gratifyingly large as a “difficult“ living composer's CDiscography already is, the collector with an interest in the music of his time and place cannot afford to ignore these good resurrections. (Of all the one-man operations I admire—I offer the term as an alternative to “little“ label, which in terms of long catalogs many are not—Fred Maroth's Music & Arts Programs of America, Inc., remains among the more endearingly hydra-headed.)

It's a lot easier to tell you what the electronic piece, Time's Encomium, isn't: it isn't imitative of nature or acoustic musical instruments. If the point seems inappropriate or trivial, I remind the reader that a great deal of synthesized sound appears to exist for these kitsch aspirations. So then, while Times's Encomium in this narrow regard falls on the ear as abstraction pure but far from simple, I urge the reader not to conflate abstract with offputting. The piece abounds with playful energies. When disparate sounds interact as friskily as they do here, play of one kind or another, whether or not one knows the game's name, is obviously the thing, Wuorinen is the kind of cerebral practitioner who requires one's attention in a state of openness. We do not hear Time's Encomium transpiring toward a direction. The logic is rather that of extraordinary fireflies of various heft, hue, and gravitas. As anyone who's spent a country night outdoors, a lightshow's enjoyment need not connect with those forces that stage it. The listener is content (if he's wise) to perceive the co.nposer as firefly or, better yet, the firefly's First Mover. Wuorinen composed the work between 1968-69 at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center In New York.“ . . . The RCA synthesizer . . . is prejudiced by design toward 12-tone equal temperament . . . [I]f one accepts the limitation as a boundary condition . . . it ceases to be a problem. . . . Afterwards, I made the large-scale structure by processing the synthesized materials in one of the [center's] analog studios. Thus the work consists of a core of synthesized music, most of which appears in Part I, surrounded and interlarded with analog-studio transformations of that music. The synthesized [can be] identified by its clarity of pitch. . . . The processed almost always contains reverberation. Thus metaphorically, the listener stands in the midst of the synthesized music, which presents itself . . . with maximal clarity; and stretching away from him, becoming more and more blurred in detail, the various transformations . . .“ I assume that Wuorinen speaks in “standing] in the midst“ of the four-channel original, which one hears to his regret as a two-channel mixdown. We are back on my Fanfare hobby horse.

In no way strange to say, Wuorinen's Piano Sonata (No. 1, 1969) appears on its surface to share in those compositional impulses and schemata that yielded Time's Encomium. This seems to me especially true of the music's fast-paced, angular energies. Of particular interest is the sonata's performer, the late Robert Black. As others have for David Tudor, Wuorinen composed an obviously difficult work in large measure as a tribute to Black's strengths and sympathies. (Because music absorbs its background, we tend to overlook an executant's sometime part in a work's conception, no less its successful performance—which Black's certainly sounds to be.)

Wuorinen's comments about his here handsomely performed First String Quartet have the ring of a manifesto. “The [quartet of 1971] reflects fundamental concerns . . . with questions of large-scale form, in particular the issue of an appropriate developmental—or 'directed'—structure suited to a non tonal environment. I had already become . . . impatient with [much of new music's directionlessness] and wanted to establish formal procedures that would allow local flexibility while solidly undergirding a musical progress analogous to the very powerfully directed structure of tonality [my italics].“ Wuorinen then gives a summary of his solution, which need not detain us here. Enough to know what was then on the mind that remains aloof from a world, in too large part, of half-baked juvenalia. The String Quartet (No. 1) plays vis-à-vis the electronic and solo-piano work a tad richer in lyrical interest, in acknowledgement perhaps of a four-string ensemble's native soulfulness. The insert mentions an earlier Music & Arts CD of this Wuorinen quartet, with one of Milton Babbitt's, as an inferior transfer. While I haven't that disc to compare, the present digitization of an analog master sounds very good indeed. Again, the three volumes of this Wuorinen edition—there are no immediate plans for a fourth—address a need. All three volumes heartily recommended.

-- Mike Silverton, FANFARE [3/1997]

BLOCH: Piano Sonata No. 3 / RUGGLES: Evocations (version for

Here is a recently discovered passionate and expressive live recording by the then 52 year-old German master, Adolf Busch, who made very few concerto recordings, conducted by his old school mate, William Steinberg. The coupling is a fine live performance of the Clarinet Quintet from a Town Hall concert in New York, at which Reginald Kell made his U.S. debut. The technical reconstruction was done by Maggi Payne and the liner notes are by Tully Potter.

A performance of the Ninth was always 'a sacred occasion for Furtwängler since his earliest days', according to his assistant Berta Geissmar. This was the case from the beginning of the First World War through the Pension Fund Concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic decades later, 'while the impetus for the historic performance of the Ninth given in Bayreuth on 29 July 1951,' she writes, 'was the reopening of the festival and the reconsecration of its Festspielhaus. Nowhere in the recordings extant by Furtwängler is there a more cogent reaffirmation of Kierkegaard's dictum 'truth is subjectivity' than in the existing performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Like the recordings of the Fifth, these span the three great periods of Furtwängler's musical life: the prewar heights of technical assurance (the re-creation of sound through the combined resources of mind and heart), the war years during which a powerful sense of time and history and rage tempered technique, and the postwar years in which all that had gone before was recast through a hard-won serenity and sense of perspective.' Nine of Furtwängler's performances of the Ninth have been made public, all from live performances, plus the rehearsal of the third and fourth movements from the 1954 Bayreuth Festival. The Ninth was a work he never attempted in the studio, perhaps because of the importance he attached to it as a communal experience. We are fortunate to have here, released on CD for the first time, and in good sound, Furtwängler's last Bayreuth Festival opening performance of the Ninth.

Historic Concert Performances

Ravel's recording in 1930 of his Boléro is one of the great treasures of recorded music with its consistent tempo of quarter note = 63 instead of quarter note = 76 as marked and which the composer did not accelerate. This is not its first appearance on compact disc. It was released briefly with wobbly sound and deadened by the No Noise process (Philips 420 778-2) where it was misdated 1932 on the packaging. Now at last we have it in an astonishingly well-engineered transfer. (The Philips release also had Ravel's Chansons madécasses sung by the incomparable Madeline Grey with Ravel as her accompanist. This, too, was not without sonic blemishes and can still be heard to better advantage on the real-time cassette (In Sync C4143).) Ravel's recording of the Introduction and Allegro dates from 1923. There is more than a little surface noise on the discs used to make this transfer, but it becomes secondary to the hypnotic exoticism of this performance.

The three finest recordings of Ravel's string quartet I have heard are the one the Galimir String Quartet recorded in 1934, the one Galimir recorded in 1983 for Vanguard, and this performance from 1927 by the International String Quartet approved in all its particulars by Ravel and, chronologically, the first to be committed to discs. There are some intonation problems from cellist Herbert Withers in the third movement and the surfaces are not silent, but the fervor and the depth of emotional involvement are such as to override such reservations.

Ravel himself preferred the Pavane to be taken very slowly—as Koussevitzky recorded it in 1947—but Pierné's performance from 1929 was the slowest to appear during the composer's lifetime. Albert Wolff's recording of La Valse, while not the equal of later performances by Monteux and Ansermet, certainly can hold its own among them and its sheer elegance and poetry manifest the gentle approach the composer preferred. There is sufficient Ravel material to fill yet another compact disc and we can hope it will appear in time. William Malloch who did the transfers for this release also wrote the exemplary notes.

-- Jon Tuska, FANFARE [3/1993]

The conductor’s Prometheus, the Poem of Fire (without wordless chorus; not uncommon during the period of recording) is Scriabin without the impressionistic gauze that often covers the piece on other recordings. In Mitropoulos’s reading, the work is mercurial, its buoyant rhythms never lost beneath the soaring thematic phrases. The conductor’s management of overlapping instrumental layers is striking: nothing is lost, all voices distinctly heard without sacrifice of impetuosity. It’s a too often made complaint by those of us who were raised in the 78-rpm and LP eras that there are digital releases of a given composition that supply less transparency and color than an old analog reissue; but in the case of this work, it certainly holds true. For all its age, this is a welcome addition to the catalog.

As with Prometheus, so with Pelleas und Melisande. All too readily it is cloaked in an opulent, impressionistic haze, with Karajan/Berlin Phil providing a good example of this bad approach (DG 2GOR 457721). Mitropoulos, by contrast, exhibits commitment, clear-edged detail, and a naturally expressive pulse that makes Karajan sound like a well-oiled machine. He doesn’t round off the corners of this music, but balances the various orchestral lines in a way that brings out its more fiery, dramatic nature.

-- Barry Brenesal, FANFARE

On the 1956 set from Bayreuth [the role of Kothner] is taken by no lesser artist than Fischer-Dieskau, who presents to the life the precise, fussy keeper of the seal, none better on any recording of the work. But there is hardly a poor performance from any singer. Windgassen, who rarely undertook Walther, sings the part with untiring freshness and life, phrasing with a long line and an innate musicality that make Walther's music for once a pleasure to hear from start to finish. Brouwenstijn is his lull-throated if not very individual Eva. Stolze's David is predictably vivid, Schmitt-Walther's pedantic, unexaggerated Beckmesser a nice change from the then-customary caricature. Greindl's Pogner is not ideally steady but imbued with eloquent diction and feeling.

The clinching performance is Hotter's Sachs, profoundly satisfying in its depth of feeling, its understanding of every facet of Sachs's complex character, and he gives his two monologues a musing. interior quality that goes to the heart of the matter. Vocally, he starts a shade tired - not surprising when he was also that festivals Wotan - but, crucially, by the start of Act 2 he strikes his best form. This set would be worth hearing for him alone.

Cluytens's conducting is not on the Knappertsbusch level, rather matter-of-fact in the first two acts, much more inspired in Act 3—but in any case nothing can dim the quality here of the handpicked Bayreuth forces. Unfortunately this recording, unlike the other two, has moments of poor sound, but it is never unsatisfactory enough to mar the performance's many assets.

-- Gramophone [10/1998]

We're talking major discovery here. This magnificent in-concert New York performance of Gustav Mahler's final symphony-cum-song-cycle is musical gold, putting three of the four available Bruno Walter performances of his great friend and mentor's masterpiece in the shade. This recording originates from a performance on February 22, 1953, remastered from an off-air FM radio tape. Music & Arts apologizes for some hum, but I found the sound to be remarkably full and present, vastly preferable to the conductor's studio version of a decade later, which even in the latest Bruno Walter Edition incarnation (Sony) suffers from an opaque and cloudy recording quality.

More crucially, although, like most of his late Mahler recordings, the 1960 Das Lied is appealing for its integrity and Viennese Gemütlichkeit, seven years earlier Walter was a much more energized Mahlerian, and this performance fairly crackles with electricity and tension, qualities lacking in his late Mahler recordings. Set Svanholm is a much more involved soloist than the stodgy Ernst Haefliger, who sounds listless by comparison. The Swedish tenor sings with a wonderfully hearty vigor, Svanholm's almost defiantly projected Der Trunkene in Frühling notably vibrant and full of character. Elena Nikolaidi is somewhat more problematic. Initially, I found the Greek contralto's fluttery timbre and wide vibrato off-putting; but Nikolaidi's singing improves as the performance continues, and, despite the shaky upper register, her rich-toned singing of the Abschied is quite affecting, the long farewell of the coda heartbreaking.

Yet it is Walter's dynamic conducting and the fabulous response of the New York Philharmonic (known at the time as the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra) that makes this a performance to treasure. Listen to the desolate flute, for example, at the start of the Abschied, and the firmly pointed and wonderfully expressive orchestral playing that follows. With magnificent playing by the New York musicians, Walter elicits a wider range of orchestral coloring and a richer vein of emotion, with a firmer and more incisive grip than on his other performances.

As of this writing, Schwann lists the classic 1952 Vienna performance with Ferrier and Patzak as deleted. While not quite equaling that performance, I'd have to rank this second, below the Vienna performance of the previous year, but above the 1960 studio version (despite some fine singing by Mildred Miller) and the 1936 Vienna performance with Kerstin Thorborg and Charles Kullman (available on a variety of historical labels, including Music & Arts). Indeed, I would say this is one of the very best versions ever committed to disc. Bernard Haitink's burnished performance offers unearthly singing by Janet Baker, now available on yet another unbeatable Philips Duo set of Mahler's orchestral songs. Unlike the Philips and Sony discs, Music & Arts includes full texts and translations, commendable in a historical label where the majors won't provide one. The sound is remarkably rich and focused, with orchestral detail much clearer than on the 1963 Sony or the 1936 Vienna performance. There is a two-minute gap in the source tape about thirteen minutes into the Abschied, which is filled in with an AM broadcast tape of the same performance, and while the change in acoustic is jarring, it's not that big a deal.

A wonderful performance, an essential buy for Mahlerians and Bruno Walter fans, and one of the most worthy of Music & Arts's yeoman historical excavations.

-- Lawrence A. Johnson, FANFARE [7/1997]

Furtwangler: The Best Studio Recordings (1929-1943)